Lecture 4 (January 30):
The support vector classifier, aka soft-margin support vector machine (SVM).
Features and nonlinear decision boundaries.
Read ESL, Section 12.2 up to and including the first paragraph of 12.2.1.
My lecture notes (PDF).
The screencast.

The Midterm
takes place on Monday, March 13,
at either 6:30–8:00 PM in 2050 VLSB or 7:00–8:30 PM
in Pimental Hall, depending on which room we assign you to.
You are permitted one “cheat sheet” of letter-sized
(8½" × 11") paper.

Lecture 18 (April 3):
Neuron biology: axons, dendrites, synapses, action potentials.
Differences between traditional computational models and
neuronal computational models.
Backpropagation with softmax outputs and logistic loss.
Unit saturation, aka the vanishing gradient problem, and ways to mitigate it.
Heuristics for avoiding bad local minima.
Optional: Try out some of the Javascript demos on
this
excellent web page—and if time permits, read the text too.
The first four demos illustrate the neuron saturation problem and
its fix with the logistic loss (cross-entropy) functions.
The fifth demo gives you sliders so you can understand how softmax works.
My lecture notes (PDF).
The screencast.

Lecture 25 (April 26):
Speeding up nearest neighbor queries.
Voronoi diagrams and point location.
k-d trees.
Application of nearest neighbor search to the problem of
geolocalization:
given a query photograph, determine where in the world it was taken.
For reference:
the best paper I know about how to implement a k-d tree is
Sunil Arya and David M. Mount,
Algorithms for
Fast Vector Quantization,
Data Compression Conference, pages 381–390, March 1993.
For reference:
the IM2GPS web page,
which includes a link to the paper.
My lecture notes (PDF).
The screencast.

Discussion
Sections and Teaching Assistants

Grading

40% for homeworks.

20% for the Midterm.

CS 189: 40% for the Final Exam.

CS 289A: 20% for the Final Exam.

CS 289A: 20% for a project.

Supported in part by the National Science Foundation
under Awards CCF-0430065, CCF-0635381, IIS-0915462, and CCF-1423560,
in part by a gift from the Okawa Foundation,
and in part by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.